Alito Shiving the Far Right?

Alito signals he'll respect precedent regarding Roe.

Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. has signaled he would be highly reluctant to overturn long-standing precedents such as the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling, a move that has helped to silence some of his critics and may resolve a key problem early in the Senate confirmation process, several senators said yesterday.

In private meetings with senators who support abortion rights, Alito has said the Supreme Court should be quite wary of reversing decisions that have been repeatedly upheld, according to the senators who said it was clear that the context was abortion.

"He basically said . . . that Roe was precedent on which people -- a lot of people -- relied, and been precedent now for decades and therefore deserved great respect," Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) told reporters after meeting with Alito yesterday. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she had a similar conversation about an hour later with Alito, who has made clear that he personally opposes abortion.

"I asked him whether it made a difference to him if he disagreed with the initial decision but it had been reaffirmed several times since then," Collins told reporters. "I was obviously referring to Roe in that question. He assured me that he has tremendous respect for precedent and that his approach is to not overturn cases due to a disagreement with how they were originally decided."

Of course, Clarence Thomas out-and-out lied to the Judiciary Committee on the subject during his hearings. Once they're on the bench, there's no accountability. It's very hard to know what to make of this, particularly when contrasted with the man's prior rulings on the subject. Pulling out this newspaper article and yelling "Alito lied to us!" isn't exactly going to cause him to resign in disgrace. I'm not accusing Alito of lying, but to me he'll have to reconcile these statements with his record in the confirmation hearings.

We're a week in. A week into the process, there was no way Harriet Miers would withdraw her nomination. Long way to go here.